Fu Tingli had always thought love at first sight was a pretty mystical thing.
But on second thought, it wasn’t so strange for it to happen to her.
She couldn’t imagine someone like her falling profoundly in love with another person the way it happened in movies—unless it was love at first sight, what other way could there be?
After years of knowing someone and then piecing together a bunch of logical reasons to love them? That wouldn’t be love at all, let alone profound love.
That was why her friends often teased her in jest, saying she was an artist—not in her day job, but in her personality and temperament.
She didn’t deny her innate love for romance and freedom, her life motto to seize every novel experience the world had to offer.
But that day, she was the one who got caught—by Kong Liyuan.
It was in one of those utterly bland Junes, far from flower season, when Fu Tingli fell for California lupine.
Everyone knew it was California’s state flower, the most distinctive golden sight in the wilds—lush and hardy, but so wild it carried a touch of poison.
They said even brushing against it could make you itch, and in bad cases, trigger a life-threatening allergic reaction.
Yet she had chosen California lupine.
Later, she divided it into several bunches and hung them from the car. And the passenger seat gained an unfamiliar woman.
Fu Tingli had known all along that this woman was deceiving her.
She had suspected as much from the very start—back when the woman flagged her down, fixed her with those eerily calm eyes, and spoke her first words.
Her suspicions were all but confirmed later, in the details of the latter part of their journey. No one could stay that composed while barefoot with a gaping wound on their face. No one would ignore whether she drove fast or slow, just lounging back to catch the breeze and nap, tagging along through the stops and starts of their three-day, three-night road trip.
What was more, the wound on the woman’s face was viciously sharp, but its edges were too neat, almost deliberately carved.
But what did it matter?
Fu Tingli didn’t consider herself the type to draw hard lines at the truth. This trip was just her way of measuring 0.08% of the Earth’s surface, after all.
It was naturally infused with romance and openness, but also brimming with unreality and lies.
She didn’t mind the lies.
Truth be told, she was still young—too young to believe such deceptions could hurt her, too confident she could walk away unscathed.
So no matter what, she wanted to give it a try.
A journey should be reckless like that. And she loved fresh things, fresh people.
That was why she took the initiative and kissed the woman.
She had felt the urge the first time the woman raised that question. Or maybe even earlier, the moment the woman climbed into the car and her gaze had locked uncontrollably on the lower half of that face. So the second time around, she had no intention of just parting ways.
Better a story born from this than dodging some fated end with nothing to show for it.
It was her first kiss with another person—their first kiss. Both knew how it would end, yet neither foresaw that it would be the start of utter devastation.
Fu Tingli fumbled at first, her neck pinned by the woman in the car. It wasn’t a comfortable position, but she had no desire to pull away.
Not until her jaw was gently shifted aside.
She blinked her eyes open in confusion and realized she had rubbed off the Band-Aid the woman had just applied. Her rubbing had smeared the wound’s seepage of red everywhere.
She licked instinctively at the corner of her mouth. There was a faint taste of iron rust. Her first kiss had been far more intense—and fresher—than she had imagined.
But she froze all the same.
The woman’s face was a mess from her rubbing, her hair tousled by the wind, the smeared blood stark against her skin, flickering dimly under passing headlights like endless wildfire.
“Your facial wound is bleeding again,” she said.
Dusk deepened as another train rumbled past on its tracks. Propped against the car window, the woman looked up at her own reflection and let out a lazy smile—one that set the whole car trembling.
When the laughter faded, she stretched out languidly and wiped the bloodstains from Fu Tingli’s face with the pad of her finger, pressing just firmly enough.
“How old are you? You’re not underage, are you?” the woman asked, twilight pooling in the depths of her eyes.
“I turned nineteen a while ago—almost twenty now.” Noticing the swirling darkness in those eyes, Fu Tingli curved her own in a smile and added, “Want to see my ID?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
The finger lingered on her face, slowly tracing every inch of skin.
When it reached her lips, it ground brazenly against her lower lip, even pausing there deliberately. The woman had lingered in that same spot just moments before.
Fu Tingli recalled it all: the woman’s finger pressing behind her ear, her nose tip brushing the side of Fu Tingli’s face. They had kissed amid all that fading blood.
Her heart still raced at the memory. Then she heard the woman drawl leisurely, “I believe you wouldn’t lie.”
Whether she truly believed it or not, Fu Tingli figured the woman didn’t care if it was truth or lie.
But if she actually pulled out her ID, the woman would probably find it a hassle. Fu Tingli guessed she wanted nothing to do with exchanging names.
And this woman clearly wasn’t some paragon of morality. Fu Tingli hadn’t lied, after all—even if her twentieth birthday was just around the corner.
That was her guess, anyway.
Suddenly, she leaned in closer and peered at the wound on the woman’s face, saying with some concern, “You need to reapply the medicine.”
In her heart, though, she knew this kiss wouldn’t be easy to forget.
And she was right. Later on—somewhere she couldn’t quite recall now—someone had told her:
Just smelling a familiar scent could trigger memories from that exact moment. It was an uncontrollable physiological response.
This was known as the Proust effect.
That was when the Proust effect first left a deep impression on her, all because of this blood-tinged memory she could never shake.
So whenever she caught that faint iron-rust smell again, she would remember it: the woman casually tilting up her chin and murmuring, “We’ll talk later.”
She remembered how the woman hadn’t minded her own still-bleeding wound but had so carefully, so earnestly wiped the lingering red from Fu Tingli’s face.
Yet no matter how she wiped, she couldn’t get it all.
At last, the woman seemed to lose patience. Her expression never changed—not even hiding a faint quirk of her lips, as if she were smiling.
But Fu Tingli could sense that impatience in the woman’s subtly trembling lashes.
She knew full well it wasn’t aimed at her.
It was the blood she couldn’t wipe clean from Fu Tingli’s face. The woman didn’t want her face stained with her blood.
Fu Tingli felt a thrill of novelty in that stark disconnect.
“Here!”
Just then, a bright female voice rang out from behind, high-spirited and boisterous.
Before Fu Tingli could turn, the woman in the car deftly raised her hand and caught whatever had been thrown.
Fu Tingli followed the high, precise arc back to its source.
There, pulled over a short distance away, was a woman on a motorcycle. She wore a leather jacket and helmet with a visor so rough and battered it looked like it’d been scrubbed with steel wool a dozen times.
Straddling the back seat was a girl in a hoodie and short skirt. Her helmet was daintier than the leather-clad woman’s—brand-new and gleaming, with a slim guitar case slung across her back.
They looked just like the ill-fated lovers from some movie, rashly picking a moonless, windy night to elope on a motorcycle, guitar in tow.
Catching their stares, they waved enthusiastically. The leather woman flipped up her visor and laughed wildly.
The hoodie girl was Chinese. Amid the whooshing wind, like an indie film actress delivering a corny line, she shouted, “Now that I’ve caught you two, true lovers have to end up together!”
Before Fu Tingli could even respond, the motorcycle revved with a thunderous roar. Like the abrupt finale of some low-budget flick, the pair vanished in a blaze of glory from sight.
“They actually look like a pair of lovers,” Fu Tingli said with a smiling bend of her eyes, then sighed.
This wasn’t her first solo road trip, nor the first time she’d met quirky, effusive strangers.
And she certainly didn’t see such an encounter as an affront.
It was a vibrant spirit you only found on the road, nowhere else.
Fu Tingli turned back to find the woman in the car staring thoughtfully at the object in her hand.
“What’s that?” she asked, leaning over.
“A gift from your ‘true lovers.'”
The woman lifted her chin downward for Fu Tingli to see, then shook the box—blue tinged faintly green.
She pulled a wet wipe from her pocket and slowly, methodically wiped the bloodstains from Fu Tingli’s face.
Then she handed over the rest.
Fu Tingli took it in a daze and discovered it was a pack of cigarettes.
Or not quite—it was a crumpled-up cigarette box with a blue-green wrapper.
Flipping it open revealed two cigarettes left inside, the remaining space crammed with a half-used pack of wet wipes.
“So you’re the one bringing charcoal in the snow,” Fu Tingli said, beaming.
The woman was wiping her face and glanced up at her words. “You’re not scared of running into bad guys?”
“It’s not that serious,” Fu Tingli replied. She pulled a cigarette from the box and examined it in the dim night light. “We’re all Chinese, and—”
She cut herself off too sharply, nearly biting her tongue. But that was still preferable to letting slip the rest about “lovers finally becoming family.”
Even without biting her tongue, though, the woman likely noticed the abrupt halt. Her fingertip brushed ever so lightly across Fu Tingli’s skin as she smiled with lazy decadence.
“What? You think… we don’t count as lovers?”
Fu Tingli shook her head honestly. “I don’t know.”
She couldn’t say for sure if they qualified as lovers. After all, craving novelty, bodies, shared roads, and someone real to talk journeys with—couldn’t that count as a fling?
But they probably couldn’t end up together.
Fu Tingli had no idea why she’d added that “probably.” She knew full well their paths would diverge. And neither she nor this woman cared about the outcome.
She really shouldn’t have hedged like that.
The woman gazed at her without pressing further on the “lovers” business.
With a bland expression, she tossed aside the used wet wipe, still flecked with translucent red streaks.
Blood from the woman’s own face.
Yet the woman couldn’t have cared less. She just gave it a casual wipe or two in the car’s mirror.
“It’s getting late. I’ll find someplace to reapply your medicine later,” Fu Tingli said, wrinkling her nose.
“We can’t rip it open again this time, or it might get infected.”
She knew the woman probably didn’t give a damn about pain, but she added gently anyway,
“It’ll hurt worse than it does now.”
As expected, the woman acknowledged it offhandedly. Then she took the cigarette box from Fu Tingli’s hand, extracted a cigarette, produced a lighter from God-knows-where, lit up, and took a leisurely drag.
This woman had intercepted her barefoot, yet somehow carried a lighter.
“You smoke?”
Fu Tingli asked, curiosity piqued. It made perfect sense, really—this woman looked stunning when she smoked, like a femme fatale straight out of some fin-de-siècle film.
The woman exhaled a slow plume of white smoke and patted Fu Tingli’s cheek lightly. Then she smiled again, flashing the cigarette box as her fingertip traced the Latin motto printed on it:
